All American High Revisited

A second documentary film about the former Torrance High senior class was directed by Keva Rosenfeld in 2014 (released in 2015), All American High Revisited. It combines the original film with new footage of the film’s principal subjects being interviewed on their high school years, the process of growing up, and the various paths in life that they took.

The film was released in October 1968 by Wiseman’s distribution company, Zipporah Films. High School has been aired on PBS Television. Wiseman distributes his work (DVDs and 16mm prints) through Zipporah Films, which rents them to high schools, colleges, and libraries on a five-year long-term lease. High School was selected in 1991 for preservation in the National Film Registry.

Wiseman made a second documentary on high school, High School II, based on Central Park East Secondary School in New York City, released in 1994.

This cinéma vérité documentary covers several months in the lives of a group of high school students in Muncie, Ind. The filmmaker focuses on Lynn, a white girl whose relationship with an African-American student has caused controversy. After a cross is burned on her lawn, Lynn responds with righteous anger rather than fear, standing up to her community’s bigotry. Meanwhile, Lynn’s peers face their own trials, including an unplanned pregnancy and alcohol abuse.

‘In their final year at Muncie’s Southside High School, a group of seniors hurtles toward maturity with a combination of joy, despair, and an aggravated sense of urgency. They are also learning a great deal about life, both in and out of school, and not what school officials think they are teaching.’ -IMdB

The first of his 14 stand-up comedy specials for HBO was filmed in 1977. From the late 1980s, Carlin’s routines focused on socio-cultural criticism of modern American society. He often commented on contemporary political issues in the United States and satirized the excesses of American culture. In 2004, Carlin placed second on the Comedy Central list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians of all time, ahead of Lenny Bruce and behind Richard Pryor. He was a frequent performer and guest host on The Tonight Show during the three-decadeJohnny Carson era, and hosted the first episode of Saturday Night Live. His final HBO special,It’s Bad for Ya, was filmed less than four months before his death. In 2008, he was posthumously awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

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Last night on the CBS Evening News (2/25/13), viewers saw this brief report from anchor Scott Pelley: Iran’s culture minister today called the Oscar-winning film Argo about the Iranian hostage crisis “distorted history.” He said this on the same day that Iran’s Fars news agency gave a lesson in how to distort history. Have a look. This is Michelle Obama presenting Argo with the Best Picture Oscar last night and this is how she looked today in the Iranian press after some Photoshop alterations to cover her chest and shoulders in the conservative Islamic country. You can see the photo, apparently from Iranian media, to the right. This is a useful lesson in propaganda–though not the one CBS intended. I suppose we might ignore that the first lady of a country appeared at an awards show, flanked by members of the military, to present a prize to a film about the heroism of U.S. intelligence against an official enemy state. No, the real problem is Iran’s Photoshopping.

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Earlier this week, the Copyright Alert System (CAS)—better known as “six strikes”—finally debuted. Both Verizon and Comcast activated the service on Wednesday. The new system is funded by a group known as the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which is made up of five major American ISPs, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It’s been in the works for years and may provide a significant change to the copyright infringement policing regime in the United States. At the end of a series of six alerts, accused infringing customers could have their home Internet connection significantly slowed down. Those accused of infringing can file an appeal for $35. (Here’s the CCI’s new video explaining the process, as well as its new promo video.)

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If you care about food safety, this is an important case to watch. First, because the existence of the case is so unusual; second, because (according to the indictment), the behavior that prompted it was so egregious. As presented by the feds, this was not accidental contamination, or sales of a product in which contamination could not have been controlled. It was, in their 52-page telling, deliberate and repeated, and apparently indifferent to the harm it might cause. If behavior such as they describe can’t be called to account, it would be worth asking why we have food-safety laws at all.

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The Titanium Escape Ring adds another tool to the operator’s E&E options for escaping captivity. It’s a simple but elegant-looking ring made of titanium, cut from solid barstock and polished to a mirror finish. But unlike all other rings, this one contains a saw and handcuff shim pick combination tool which is completely hidden from view when worn.

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It’s not just nuclear weapons proliferating on the Korean peninsula these days. In a move that for once is not considered a threat to regional and global security, the North Korean government has recommended a relatively generous range of 28 hairstyles for its citizens, claiming that they are “the most comfortable” styles and capable of warding off the corrupting effects of capitalism, according to ifeng.com, a news website run by Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV network.

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During the last housing crash, the big banks begged the federal government for help and they received it, but when average Americans ask the big banks for help most of the time the banks show no mercy whatsoever. If you fall behind on your mortgage payments, the big banks have shown that they are willing to be absolutely ruthless. They will change locks in the middle of the night, they will toss disabled veterans and families with children out into the street in the middle of winter, and sometimes once the foreclosure process has begun they will not even allow someone to come forward and offer to pay off the loan if they think that they can make more money by selling the home. The big banks will often string homeowners along for months or even years with loan modification promises, only to drop the hammer on them at the most inopportune time. Over the past several years there has been case after case where mortgage documents have “disappeared”, where big banks have “manufactured…

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Recently, the internet exposed a Yunnan province Shizong county Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) member smashing a departure gate after missing his plane. Today, the Shizong county CPPCC office responded, confirming that the person seen in the video is CPPCC Shizong county 8th committee member Yan Linkun, and that Yan’s act of vandalism was the act of an individual. With regards to this, the Shizong county CPPCC supports the airport security’s lawful investigation and handling of Yan’s behavior.

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Last fall, officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) seized an iPhone from the bedroom of a suspect in a drug investigation. In a single data extraction session, ICE collected a huge array of personal data from the phone. Among other information, ICE obtained: call activity phone book directory information stored voicemails and text messages photos and videos apps eight different passwords 659 geolocation points, including 227 cell towers and 403 WiFi networks with which the cell phone had previously connected. Before the age of smartphones, it was impossible for police to gather this much private information about a person’s communications, historical movements, and private life during an arrest. Our pockets and bags simply aren’t big enough to carry paper records revealing that much data. We would have never carried around several years’ worth of correspondence, for example—but today, five-year-old emails are just a few clicks away us…

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Within hours the video had been posted around the Web; it had been shared with the Twitter followers of Time magazine and Ellen DeGeneres; and it had been broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show and its “Nightly News” program, ABC’s “Good Morning America” and Fox News, where the “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade said of it, “You couldn’t do this at Warner Brothers as a cartoon and make it seem more realistic.” But the video was thoroughly staged. It was created for a new Comedy Central series, “Nathan for You,” with the help of some 20 crew members, including animal trainers, scuba divers and humane officers, and required the fabrication of a plastic track to guide the pig to the goat (which was never in jeopardy).

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Today on the 700 Club, televangelist Pat Robertson said that demons can attach themselves to material goods and therefore it’s not a bad idea to rebuke them before bringing them into your home. After a viewer, Carrie, asked whether to follow her mom’s recommendation to pray away demonic spirits over her secondhand sweaters, Robertson recounted a story about “a witch who had prayed over a particular ring and asked for a spirit to come into it, and this Philippine girl was so attached to this ring, she had to buy it and all hell broke loose because she finally recognized what it was.” “Can demonic spirits attach themselves to inanimate objects, the answer is yes,” Robertson said.

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the rapper who has allegedly been targeted by a dangerous gang — is being protected by NYC cops round-the-clock because of recent threats … law enforcement sources tell TMZ. We’ve learned cops have been guarding Ross at The London Hotel for the last few days. Sources tell us, recent threats have been specifically aimed at the rapper … and he’s not taking them lightly. You’ll recall Ross’ Rolls-Royce was shot up in Ft. Lauderdale last month after the rapper’s birthday party while Ross was making his way home. Ross and his passenger were not injured in the attack — clearly, the shots were intended as a warning.

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in recent years, mounting evidence shows that initial suspicions that GE foods might have unforeseen consequences were indeed correct — from alteration of soil composition, to contaminating waterways with antibiotic resistant bacteria linked to GE crops,3 to serious health consequences for animals and humans who consume GE products. The first-ever study to address GE crop-related pollution of waterways discovered that Chinese rivers are contaminated with antibiotic-resistant genes from genetic engineering experiments, which (again) may have unforeseen repercussions for human health.

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Strawberry Quik lake

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The Hollywood Freeway chickens are a colony of feral chickens that live under the Vineland Avenue off-ramp of the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles, California. It is still not definitively known how they came to be there. Chickens underneath the Vineland off-ramp became local celebrities upon their arrival sometime around 1970. By 1976, the flock included about 50 chickens, which became known as “Minnie’s chickens”, named after Minnie Blumfield, an elderly retiree who fed them regularly.

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A billboard in Lima, Peru, created by ad agency Mayo DraftCFB in collaboration with the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC), captures the air’s humidity and turns it into potable water for Lima residents. Lima is referred to as a “desert megacity” where many residents cope with inadequate access to clean drinking water. The agency and university formed a team to produce what they refer to as the first billboard that produces drinking-water out of air.

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Located in between Queens and the Bronx, in 1885 the island was used to build a hospital complex to quarantine and treat people suffering from smallpox and typhoid fever. In the 1950’s it was turned into a rehab center. The entire island has been abandoned since 1963.

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Loophole for All – Became a pirate, hijack an offshore company!

Paolo Cirio, contemporary artist and pirate, hacked the governmental servers of the Cayman Islands and stole a list of all the companies incorporated in the country. Now on Loophole4All.com, he is selling the identities of those companies at a low cost to democratize the privileges of offshore businesses. Paolo hijacks the identities by moving their addresses to his Caymans mailbox and issuing counterfeited certificates of incorporation from the Caymans company registry. This massive corporate identity theft benefits from the anonymous nature of those companies since the real owners’ secrecy allows anybody to impersonate them. Through Loophole4All.com, anyone can hijack a Caymans company, from 99¢ for a certificate of incorporation for a real company to $49 for a mailbox in the offshore country with mail rerouting.

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Joshua Miner remembered his teenage girlfriend confiding “years back that she wanted to have sex with a dead guy,” states a police report documenting last month’s double murder on Hickory Street. That’s why Miner got the idea to ask girlfriend Alisa Massaro to have sex with him on the corpses of two men he’s accused of helping to kill, police said. Massaro “made a smirk on her face” and said she didn’t want to, according to the reports, but when being questioned by police, she “later acknowledged she and Josh did have sexual intercourse on top of the bodies.”

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WHITE MODEL ONDRIA HARDIN POSES FOR NUMERO MAGAZINE AS “AFRICAN QUEEN” – WHERE ARE ALL THE BLACK MODELS?

I am really not pleased with Fashion Magazine Numero’s March issue shoot titled ‘African Queen’ with Ondria Hardin bronzed out to darken her skin tone to portray herself as an ethnic lady . What happened to all the beautiful black models currently available? The same modelling agencies that represents Ondria Hardin also has a number beautiful black models such as the one here, is she not good enough? The scarcity with black models in mainstream fashion industry is absurd and simply unacceptable.

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So the debt that’s got everyone worried is the part we haven’t yet incurred. And that debt, by definition, does not exist. It’s not a certainty, it’s merely a projection by the Congressional Budget Office. And trying to model how the federal budget, not to mention the entire American economy, will behave years or even decades in the future is a devilishly treacherous business. For instance: one of Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) favorite talking points in 2011 was that the computer simulations CBO uses to model the economy crash when they attempt to account for the debt load in 2037. Imagine trying to model the 2011 economy in 1985. Things you’d never see coming include (among other things) the Internet, fracking, massive advances in computing power, the renewable energy boom, three wars, a massive recession, and Harry Potter. And predictions can be hard even over shorter time frames. In 1995, CBO predicted the deficit in 2000 would be well over $200 billion. We ran a surplus of $236 billion.

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For example, on the process for targeting subscribers, the site explains that: “Before each Alert is sent, a rigorous process ensures the content identified is definitely protected by copyright and that the notice is forwarded to the right Subscriber.” Just because content is copyrighted doesn’t mean sharing it is illegal. It would be better to have a rigorous process that ensures the use identified is actually infringing. It would be even better to have a process that was vetted by a truly independent entity, and public review of the full results. And then there are these nuggets: “While CCI encourages all consumers to secure their home networks, it is especially important for consumers who have received a Copyright Alert.” In other words, if you’ve received a notice, you’ve better lock down your network, and fast. As we’ve explained, this seems designed to undermine the open Wi-Fi movement, even though open wireless is widely recognized to be tremendously beneficial to…

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However, even as Kink flourishes — it’s nearly doubled the number of sites it operates since moving into the Armory — doubts about its ethical standards linger. The company attracted unwanted attention last summer when it abruptly switched its cam girls’ pay rate and sparked a debate about its commitment to models’ rights. Now, two former models allege they were denied workers’ compensation when injured on Kink sets, one of whom further states she was coerced into a performance that left her with long-lasting injuries and was offered money in exchange for keeping quiet about those injuries. Other workers claim to have been terminated or chose to resign when they questioned Kink’s business practices, including the use of an erectile dysfunction drug called Trimix. These allegations threaten the company’s conscientious reputation, and conflict with the stories offered by current directors and models who say their experiences inside the Armory have always been ethical and enjoyable.

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These pictures show the hidden life on your phone – the bacteria that lurk on your mobile. Long after we’ve swiped and tapped our smart phones, or sent and received texts, our devices retain a biological history of our actions. Students studying bacteriology at the University of Surrey imprinted their mobile phones on to Petri dishes to see what they might carry.

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“In the future, the Egyptian Islamists will not only be conducting systematic violence, but cannibalism against Christians and moderates,” concludes Arabic-language researchers Walid and Theodore Shoebat in a report on their website. In a television interview cited in the report, an Egyptian Islamic scholar told the interviewer, “Listen also to what they teach to kids.” The curriculum says, according to the scholar: “We allowed the eating of the flesh of dead humans … under necessary conditions. It (human flesh) must not be cooked or grilled to avoid Haram (evil) … and he can kill a murtadd (apostate) and eat him.” The scholar complained “this stuff is being taught to kids at al-Azhar.” “This is what is being taught to kids right now,” he said. “When they teach them this kind of stuff, their minds cannot accept civilization any more.” The Shoebats say the university finds its support for cannibalism in Islamic authority.

An HIV-positive adult film actor is hailing the Los Angeles City Council’s final approval of a city law requiring condoms on porn sets – but veteran star Ron Jeremy thinks its dirty politics. Jeremy, originally from New York, told the Daily News he believes this week’s vote is part of a larger effort to stamp out porn production in the industry’s sunny San Fernando Valley home. “Performers don’t mind wearing rubbers, but viewers don’t want to see it. It ruins the fantasy,” Jeremy said Wednesday. “This will force production to leave Los Angeles, and that’s really what the supporters want,” he claimed. The legendary lothario said local porn purveyors are already feeling the squeeze from a flood of overseas imports and low-budget, amateur productions – and new condom requirements will make competitive success even harder. He said mandatory, monthly STD testing – now the industry standard – is more than adequate to keep performers safe.

Federal prosecutors have shut down one of the world’s largest file-sharing sites, Megaupload.com, on charges of violating piracy laws — a day after a 24-hour blackout of popular websites such as Wikipedia drew national attention to the issue. “This action is among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States,” the Justice department said in a statement about the indictment. The indictment accuses seven individuals and two corporations — Megaupload Limited and Vestor Limited — of costing copyright holders more than $500 million in lost revenue from pirated films and other content. It was unsealed on Thursday, and claims that at one point Megaupload was the 13th most popular website in the world.

However, Google’s main issue with SOPA is seemingly not related to their concerns about Chinese-style web censorship becoming commonplace, but rather which entity gets to wield those powers – large transnational corporations or governments. While Google criticizes SOPA publicly, it is already privately using SOPA-like powers to unfairly marginalize legitimate web content. Google News is a content aggregator that allows users to search thousands of news sources for relevant stories. Although the aggregator includes a plethora of obscure, occasionally offensive, and barely-read websites, in November 2010 Google took the decision to de-list PrisonPlanet.com and Infowars.com from its indexed news sources. Infowars.com alone is an internationally recognized news website that gets more traffic than MSNBC.com and innumerable other big mainstream news websites.

Thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets of Jerusalem, in protest against what they say is discrimination against Jews of Ethiopian origin. The protest came after a recent report in the Israeli media that landlords in southern Israel had agreed not to rent or sell their real estate to Jews of Ethiopian origin.

New research shows the disastrous consequences the world’s rising carbon dioxide levels are having on ocean life. Photo courtesy of Dr Simon Foale, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies A team of researchers from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University published their findings in the journal Nature Climate Change. They document how elevated CO2 is “driving fish crazy.”

A bigot named their WiFi signal “F— All Jews and N—-” — and now cops are investigating. The hateful signal I.D. popped up on the iPhone of a 28-year-old mom inside a Teaneck, N.J. recreation center, where her 3-year-old daughter was attending dance class. The offending signal was coming from a router connected in the Richard Rodda Community Center in the the township, located 10 miles outside New York City. “When I first saw it, I said, ‘Did that say what I thought it said?,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used. “I was shocked, hurt. I felt harassed.” The signal showed on her phone as it searched for an Internet connection in the center Tuesday. “I felt like I’m bringing my daughter to this place, and it should be a safe place,” she said.

Have you ever wondered what a virus sounds like? Or what noise a bacterium makes when it moves between hosts? If the answer is yes, you may soon get your chance to find out, thanks to the development of the world’s tiniest ear. The “nano-ear,” a microscopic particle of gold trapped by a laser beam, can detect sound a million times fainter than the threshold for human hearing. Researchers suggest the work could open up a whole new field of “acoustic microscopy,” in which organisms are studied using the sound they emit.

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature.

You have to feel sorry for the police officers who are required to frisk people for guns or knives – after all, if someone who doesn’t want to be arrested is carrying a lethal weapon, the last thing that most of us would want to do is get close enough to that person to touch them. That’s why the New York Police Department teamed up with the United States Department of Defense three years ago, and began developing a portable scanner that can remotely detect the presence of a gun on a person’s body. The NYPD announced the project yesterday.

Andrei Chikatilo, “The Butcher of Rostov,” was one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. Between 1978 and 1990 in the Ukraine, he committed at least 52 murders before he was caught, tried and executed. The pattern of his murders, though, was irregular. There were long periods of no activity, interrupted by several murders within a short period of time. Hoping to gain insight into serial killings to prevent similar murders, his pattern of behavior was examined by Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury at UCLA. They’ve published a paper on ArXiv with their preliminary results.

As many as 10 fake iPad 2s, all made of slabs of modeling clay, were recently sold at electronic stores in Vancouver, British Columbia. Best Buy and Future Shop have launched investigations into how the scam was pulled off. The tablet computers, like most Apple products, are known for their sleek and simple designs. But there’s no mistaking the iPad for one of the world’s oldest “tablet devices.” Still, most electronic products cannot be returned to stores. For the the stores and customers to be fooled by the clay replacements, the thieves must have successfully weighed out the clay portions and resealed the original Apple packaging.

Anybody willing to pay the asking rent of £90,000 a year can take over the 13-hectare site in a secluded forest in eastern Poland, which during the war lay in German East Prussia. From 1941 to the end of 1944 the Wolf’s Lair was the nerve centre of the Nazi war machine owing to its proximity to the Eastern Front. The Polish Forestry Service, the owners of the camp, started looking for a tenant after the old 20-year lease expired. Hitler and his henchman built huge bombproof bunkers at the site that also housed 2,000 staff and security personnel. Although retreating German forces dynamited most of the bunkers in November 1944, their shattered shells remain a prime tourist attraction with some 180,000 visitors a year.

Believe it or not, to legally watch that famous Martin Luther King “I Have a Dream” speech — arguably one of the most hallowed moments in American history — costs $10 thanks to the twisted state of United States copyright law.

Before anyone asks, no, it’s not bulletproof. But that doesn’t mean that the glistening yellow cape—the world’s largest garment made entirely from spider silk—isn’t a massive feat of engineering to marvel at (hint: it is and you should). Now on public display for the first time at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the textile gets its unearthly gleam from the undyed filaments of the golden orb spider, a species of arachnid commonly found in Madagascar. Girl power can be taken literally in this instance: Only the females produce the coveted silk.

Those of us un/fortunate enough to have visited the Krystal restaurant at the mouth of Bourbon Street in New Orleans know it’s a place where the occasionally odd, bizarre, or criminal events take place. We don’t know which of these this incident is, if not all three. That’s especially given that some people are claiming the victim in this is now dead, making the “This guy’s life is over” line uttered in the video creepy.

Funk/disco great Jimmy “The Everything Man” Castor passed away on Monday from unknown causes in Las Vegas, according to reports. Castor, a respected saxophonist, was the leader of the seminal funk/disco band the Jimmy Castor Bunch. The group was behind funk classics like the 1972 smash, “Troglodyte (Cave Man).” Though the group’s popularity faded at the end of the disco era, Castor’s music lived on through hip hop as his song “It’s Just Begun” became a staple break of the ’70s and ’80s b-boy break dancing scene. The song served as the back up music for the iconic b-boy collective the Rock Steady Crew in the 1983 film Flashdance. Eric B. and Rakim, the Ultramagnetic MCs, N.W.A., and Kanye West were among the hip hop names to sample Castor’s tunes over the years.

The Dual Ridge Metal Boutique tissue boxes sold at Bed, Bath & Beyond stores have been discovered to be radioactive. Made with the extremely dangerous material used to blast cancer tumors with radiation — cobalt-60 — they emit gamma rays that are known to cause both cancer and infertility. They were manufactured in India, shipped on a commercial container to New Jersey, and then distributed to Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in 20 states. How much radiation do these tissue holders emit, exactly? Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman David McIntyre said, on the record, that standing near one of these tissue holders for 30 minutes a day would expose you to the equivalent of “a couple of chest X-Rays” each year. The Illinois Emergency Management Agency went even further, issuing a release stating that every 10 hours spent near the product would expose you to the equivalent of one chest X-Ray

A housemate on Brazil’s version of Big Brother has been raped live on TV, it has been alleged. Police today confirmed they had begun an investigation and carried out a search of the studios in Rio de Janeiro, where the popular reality show is being filmed. Viewers were shocked in the early hours of Sunday to watch contestant Daniel Echaniz 31, apparently force himself on 23-year-old student Monique Amin, who had passed out drunk after a boozy party.

I’ve seen many things I don’t like, including students that had been sexually abused, photographed, and forced to drink alcohol, says Danielle Grijalva, She is the head of CSFES, an organization that helps exchange students who run into problems abroad. Only this past year, 10-12 Norwegian exchange students abroad contacted her for help.

A Freedom of Information Act has revealed the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract in 2010 to General Dynamics’ Advanced Information Systems in order to provide constant surveillance of social media, according to The Washington Post. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed the request, and according to a training manual that was among the documents they received, DHS engaged in monitoring comments on Facebook, Twitter and blogs to obtain public sentiment on a proposed transfer of Guantanamo Bay detainees to a town in Michigan. The $11 million contract awarded to General Dynamics is expected to produce “reports on DHS, Components, and other Federal Agencies: positive and negative reports on FEMA, CIA, CBP, ICE, etc. as well as organizations outside the DHS,”

When Martin Luther King Jr. said he had a dream, this likely wasn’t what he meant. A flyer promoting a Miami strip club’s “I Have a Dream Bash” featuring MLK holding wads of cash next to scantily-clad women has its creator taking plenty of flack. Miami Beach graphic designer Jeffrey Darnell Paul says he didn’t realize the flyer, made for The Office strip club at 250 Northeast 183rd Street, would generate the controversy it has. “I wasn’t trying to disrespect anybody… it wasn’t on my mind that it would escalate to something like this,” Paul told NBC Miami Monday. “It was just supposed to be a promotional thing, it wasn’t about disgracing Martin Luther King, it wasn’t about that.”

An Indiana mother forced her son to wear a sign around his neck listing his law-breaking behavior and stand on a Ft. Wayne street corner for two hours earlier this week. The sign read: “I lie, I steal, I sell drugs, I don’t follow the law.” CBS New York reports that Dynesha Lax thought the punishment police had given her son when he broke the law recently wasn’t strong enough to get him to stop his behavior, so she took matters into her own hands.

When questioned by investigators, Owens reportedly copped to entering Pake’s home on several occasions (via the doggy door) and stealing a jar of money and a camera, which she planned to pawn. The teenager, deputies noted, “stated she is addicted to pornography and purchased 20 to 30 DVD’s and owed money, that’s why she burglarized Mr. Pake’s home in attempt to get items to pawn for cash.”

In 2009, Sato broke his own record by masturbating for an impressive 9 hours and 58 minutes at the Masturbate-a-thon, the San Francisco Weekly reports. His previous record was 9 hours and 33 minutes. But self-gratification isn’t all fun and games. Apparently, there’s some actual training involved when preparing to go the distance. “I swam twice a week and gained about 5 kgs in muscle,” he told the San Francisco Weekly in an email. “That helped me a lot, too, in terms of stamina.” The Masturbate-a-thon is an annual affair sponsored by the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco, where events are held in a place appropriately titled the “masturbatorium.” If a man is taking part in a competition, he must stay aroused without ejaculating for as long as possible, a 2010 article in the San Fransisco Weekly explains. At times, the event attracts more males than females, which can be a turn off for some participants.

What happens behind closed doors between two consenting adults should be their own business, right? Well, sometimes the nocturnal goings-on are too strange to keep silent. While today’s headlines scream about the sexual misconduct of a bevy of politicians and celebrities, the pages of history are also rife with strange sex scandals.

✦ Teen trio admits smearing feces on birthday cake in prank at Pa. high school

Three Pennsylvania teens must clean toilets, urinals and bed pans after admitting they iced a birthday cake with feces as a prank on a high school classmate. The Daily Local News of West Chester reports the girls were also ordered Monday to pick up dog droppings at a local park during their 200 hours of community service in return for guilty pleas stemming from the March incident at Avon Grove High School. Authorities say the trio and a juvenile student provided school officials with written confessions after a classmate and her family was sickened by the cake.

Arsenault gained national attention when he was served with a cease order from the FDA for his private sperm donations for families who cannot reproduce. The Huffington Post reported about Arsenault’s project, commenting about his extremely healthy lifestyle and charitable goals. But Gawker reported Wednesday that Arsenault also moonlights as an online pornographer. On his extremely NSFW site, Arsenault — er, “TrentDog” — has posted more than 100 videos of himself masturbating, sometimes using unusual aids including a water polo ball and frozen packs of organic blueberries. Arsenault defended his site to Gawker, calling himself a “donorsexual.”

Sleepwalkers are known to cook, paint, and even drive without knowing it. But for a 55-year-old South Jersey woman, sleepwalking may have proved deadly. Charlene Ferrero walked away from her home at the Hill Manor Apartments in Oaklyn, N.J. early Sunday morning. The next evening, crews pulled her body from Newton Lake in Collingswood. The autopsy ruled it an accidental drowning but Ferrero’s friends believe she may have been sleepwalking because she had done it about a week and a half earlier. “I heard a knock on the door, and I go, ‘What are you doing up, honey?’ And she goes, ‘I’m so sorry. The people at Table 2 ordered the eggs,'” said Ferrero’s friend Teresa Cerini.

The Howrah Bridge is a cantilever suspension bridge that crosses the Hooghly River. Over the years, residents have been purchasing and chewing a mix of betel leaf, areca nut, and slaked lime, then spitting the mixture at the base of the bridge (among other places, I’m sure). The mixture, known as paan, is a mild stimulant and, if you take a look at the weakened steel hangars of the bridge, pretty darned corrosive. The hangars, which were once 6 millimeters thick, are now a mere 3 mm, prompting authorities to come up with news ways to prevent any future damage. One such way is to cover the bridge’s steel with a fiberglass casing. But given the corrosive spit, as well as past vehicular accidents and corrosive bid droppings, this incredibly busy bridge is in dire need of a makeover before anyone gets seriously injured.

A San Francisco man with no medical license performed liposuction on a woman while smoking a cigar, then flushed six pounds of fat he removed down the patient’s toilet, city prosecutors alleged. Carlos Guzmangarza, 49, was arrested Thursday for allegedly posing as a physician assistant to perform cosmetic surgery on the woman and treat her daughter for acne, said Stephanie Ong Stillman, a spokeswoman for the district attorney’s office. Guzmangarza is accused of operating a bogus clinic on Mission Street called the Derma Clinic. He stole the identity of a physician assistant with a similar name, Stillman said, and operated under the premise that a doctor ran the clinic.

✦ Man shoots at mouse, hits roommate in the chest; another man arrested for child rape

“A roommate, after seeing a mouse or some type of varmint in the home, shot at that particular animal,” he said Wednesday. “The round went through the adjacent wall.” A 27-year-old man in the bathroom on the other side of the wall was hit in the chest, said Wyant. He was hospitalized in critical, but stable, condition on Wednesday. Four men lived in the home. Zach Baker, who lives in the basement, said he slept through the gunshot. “I got woken up by the cops,” he told FOX 13. “They came storming in my room, checking to make sure everybody was OK and nobody was shot or anything like that.” Baker said he was stunned to see police officers surrounding him and a 13-year-old girl. Wyant said the girl was discovered hiding in a closet in the basement. “I’d never seen the girl there before and I don’t know how long she’d been there,” he said. “They said she’d been hiding in a closet and that creeps me out.”

In the premier episode they are contacted by Jim Lebus who invented a fireball Gun, more specifically incendiary paintballs, to protect himself after an encounter he describes below. “Its a deterrent for a situation out in the woods. A couple of years ago I was in northern California… I was attacked by an animal and I was in my tent. I see this shadow go past the moon. So this tells me this thing is, like, 8 feet tall. And whatever it was, was pushing me into the ground…I’m assuming it was a Bigfoot. I had a .38 with me, but you can’t just start popping off rounds. If you gonna cap Bigfoot your just gonna piss it off”

Christians are used to people rubbishing their faith, but they may find it hard to turn the other cheek after seeing Luke Roberts’s entry in this year’s Blake Prize for religious art. The provocative Brisbane artist has created three depictions of the crucifixion of Christ: in one, lesbian academic Jodie Taylor kneels at the feet of a Christ figure played by Tobin Saunders, better known as drag queen Vanessa Wagner. Another photo features Jandy Rainbow, an intersex woman, clad only in a pink G-string and nipple tassles adopting the crucifixion pose, while controversial indigenous artist Richard Bell, who judged this year’s Sulman Prize by tossing a coin, features in the third shot.

Negar Azizmoradi, leader of the Iranian branch of the International Raelian Movement (IRM), has been granted religious asylum in the United States after a long struggle that began when she publicly declared atheist/Raelian beliefs in her home country.

As we came by the checkpoint line, Schneier described one of these aspects: the ease with which people can pass through airport security with fake boarding passes. First, scan an old boarding pass, he said—more loudly than necessary, it seemed to me. Alter it with Photoshop, then print the result with a laser printer. In his hand was an example, complete with the little squiggle the T.S.A. agent had drawn on it to indicate that it had been checked. “Feeling safer?” he asked.

Even Los Angeles is prone to be chilly during the cold winter months. So that would explain why super cool actor Christopher Walken decided to don a pair of black Uggs as he arrived for a flight out of the city. The warm weather footwear is certainly not an outfit choice associated with the legendary Deer Hunter star, who is far more at home in suave suits and leather shows.

Light up a stoge with Santa

The UK’s biggest book chain, Waterstone’s, has apologised after one of its branches pushed Adolf Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf as the “perfect” Christmas present. Amid the glossy hordes of titles by Jeremy Clarkson, Lee Evans and Jamie Oliver for sale this Christmas, the Huddersfield branch of Waterstone’s used a festive sticker to describe Mein Kampf (My Struggle), the antisemitic diatribe written by Hitler in prison before he rose to power in 1933, as the “perfect present”. A staff recommendation described it as “an essential read for anyone seeking to understand one of history’s most despicable figures. A shocking read and a vital warning for future generations.”

Barbaric textbooks handed out in Saudi Arabian schools teach children how to cut off a thief’s hands and feet under Sharia law, it has emerged. The shocking books, paid for and printed by the Saudi government, also tell teenagers that Jews need to be exterminated and homosexuals should be ‘put to death’. Recent editions were obtained by the Institute for Gulf Affairs in Washington, D.C., which says they should raise fears in the West over the use of jihadist language.

✦ Race for New Air Jordan Sneakers Turns Ugly at a Metro Atlanta Mall

The quest for some limited edition sneakers took an ugly turn early Friday morning outside the Mall at Stonecrest in Lithonia. DeKalb police say several people have been arrested , including one woman who left two young children in her car, after the new Nike Air Jordan 11 Concords went on sale. Hundreds of people began lining up in the early hours at the Mall at Stonecrest to get their hands on a pair of Nike’s new Michael Jordan sneakers. Several stores inside the mall were offering the sneakers. Apparently, some people could not wait until the mall opened its doors at 8 a.m. Police were called to the scene. DeKalb police responded with as many as 20 squad cars after a large crowd apparently made an illegal entry into the mall, breaking down the door. Police escorted most of the people back outside. At least four people were arrested in that incident.

One Oregon nativity display is more of a close encounter of the third kind type. Portland artist Matt Henderson created the nativity scene using alien figurines. The display, which is inside a former church, also includes an androgynous Mary and Joseph and a shaman Santa Claus. Henderson says he does not mean to hurt anyone’s feelings with the display, instead he wants the public to use it to reflect on themselves. “You might be expecting to see an alien baby but you see a reflection of yourself. And that’s the symbolic message of nativity. Recognizing divinity and potential in yourself. And at the same time perhaps recognizing the terrestrial nature of Christ,” he explains.